Beginning generically, plus decltype considering local using-declaration

Question

C++0x\'s ranged-for loop has a special exception to handle arrays (FDIS §6.5.4), and there are two functions, std::begin and end, which are overloaded to handle arrays or to sel

Answer 1

You can special-case the arrays yourself. The type of an array is (and has to be for begin/end to work) ElementType (&)[Size], so if you overload the function like:

template
void f(C (&c)[S]) {
  do_something_with(std::begin(c), std::end(c));
}

it should behave specially like the for-loop.

On a side-note, you don't need std::begin and std::end then, they are trivial:

template
void f(C (&c)[S]) {
  do_something_with(c, c + S);
}

(may need a cast; I actually only used it with things that demanded pointers, not any iterators).

On another side-note, begin and end functions taking pointers are rather silly thing to do. If the pointed object is a collection, they should probably be taking reference instead.